Late last year controversy arose after the federal Bureau of Prisons had created a list of approved religious and spiritual books that would be allowed into prison chapels. Among those authors who was excluded from the list was the greatly influential twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth.
The potentially incendiary nature of religion was apparently the impetus behind the bureau's attempt to control access to religious works, which was quickly reversed. As one blogger put it, Karl Barth was "going back to prison!"
But concern about zealous inspiration hasn't been the only worry that has kept Karl Barth out of prison reading rooms in the past. In writing about his experience in prison ministry and prison abolition activism, Lee Griffith relates that he was prevented from bringing a volume of Barth's Church Dogmatics into the jail for a visit.
"I was told that one of the books I had brought would not be allowed into the city jail," he writes. "It so happens that the individual volumes of Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics constitute a threat – not, presumably, because of content but because they are of sufficient size and weight to serve as weapons."
As a whole, Barth's massive Church Dogmatics is constituted by 14 individual installments or "parts," comprising four larger "volumes." In 2004, T&T Clark did a great service to theological study by re-releasing the volumes in paperback. But even so, the sheer amount of material in the Church Dogmatics defies facile apprehension.
Enter Logos Bible Software with one of their latest efforts, the publication of the complete and updated Church Dogmatics produced in cooperation with the Center for Barth Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Barth's impact on the study of theology is immense, not only in his systematic and dogmatic constructions, but also in his construal of the history of church doctrine. One of Barth's legacies was the inauguration of generations of historiography that sought to distinguish between the core insights of the Reformation and in the Barthian judgment the scholastic trappings that shrouded Calvin and to a greater extent the succeeding generations of Protestant orthodox theologians.
A tool like Logos Bible Software allows much more penetrating study of Barth's Dogmatics than has ever been practically feasible before. For instance, we can now perform searches across the entire Dogmatics for words and phrases like "scholastics" and "Protestant scholasticism." This enables us to better judge how Barth uses such designations, to whom he applies them, and on what basis he does so.
Freed from the static limits of a printed index (no matter how reliable or comprehensive), the research implications for such search capabilities are enormous. A simple search for the term "scholastic" in Barth's Dogmatics reveals that he associates the term with eras of theology both preceding (i.e. medieval scholasticism) and following (i.e. Protestant scholasticism) the dawning of the Reformation in the early sixteenth century. Moreover, as in an excursus on the "Federal Theology" of the seventeenth century, we see that Barth views these eras to be characterized by rigidity and legalism.
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